National Socialism is a political term that is both vague and ambiguous. As the name suggests, features of nationalism and socialism are combined and interrelated to form an overall National Socialist ideology, although the combination process is neither obvious nor straightforward. The term most typically refers to Nazism, which was the ideology of the German Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)), which was led by Adolf Hitler.

The National Socialist Program as advanced by Adolf Hitler in 1920 set out 25 points that constituted the party's fundamentals. The points were prepared in a one-night meeting between Hitler and Anton Drexler, and were presented at a public meeting on 24 February 1920, where they were affirmed by the attendees. There were attempts to alter the program in the early 1920s, most notably by Gregor Strasser, but Hitler quashed such deviations at the 1926 Bamberg Conference, and the points were declared soon thereafter to be "immutable" at the party's 1926 General Meeting.[5][6] The Program advocated uniting the German people (through Pan-Germanism), implementing profit-sharing in industry, nationalizing trusts, providing an extensive welfare state, instituting government control of the media, and persecuting Jews, in part by canceling their German citizenship.[7] The Program stated that "Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.."